Stratospheric Aerosol Injection by Coulombic Hoist

Reprinted from “My Pages,” Hackaday.io

Updated 08-12-2024

Last update 12-26-2024

An exploration of possible modern uses of clear-weather atmospheric electricity.

The idea: On clear, calm days, release tiny, negatively charged sulfur particles near ground level (but no lower than 25 cm) and wait for them to rise into the stratosphere on the sky voltage. They should then oxidize to a sulfuric acid aerosol, which is a powerful climate cooling agent if present in the stratosphere. The stratosphere begins 8 km above the surface in the arctic and 16 km above the surface in the tropics (mode= 12 km). At the surface, the electric field of the sky voltage has an intensity of 100 to 200 volts/m, earth negative, with the maximum occurring at 18:00 UTC, no matter where you are. It is part of the global atmospheric electric circuit, which is powered by thunderstorms and other electrified clouds. Solid sulfur can be negatively charged by friction, a process called tribocharging. Tribocharging is already used in one type of powder coating technology. 

A network of photochemical reactions given here  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1620870114 (scheme 1) suggests that elemental sulfur will change into sulfuric acid aerosols in the atmosphere. (The scheme is presented as applying to anoxic conditions, but in the text, it is presented as describing current knowledge of atmospheric sulfur chemistry.) A fly in the ointment is that an irreversible step is shown going from gaseous S8 to solid S8, and I want reversible, so I am still searching for a rigorous chemical precedent for the supposed transformation. DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abc3687 figures 5B and S4, shows that when suspended in an aqueous solution at pH 6, solid sulfur generates sulfate when irradiated at 280 nm (shortest-wavelength end of the UVB range). That precedent isn’t rigorous either but it is helpful in addressing the question of providing sulfur in solid elemental form.

If stratospheric temperatures are too low to permit useable oxidation rates, microwave heating using ground-based projectors could be tried. (Such projectors could also be used for in-flight recharging of high-flying drones that deliver substances into the upper atmosphere.)

To charge negatively, the Teflon tube that is standard on a triboelectric gun will have to be replaced by a tube made with an electron donor, or else corona charging used instead of triboelectric charging. I calculate that to rise in the atmospheric electric field, a particle needs a charge to mass ratio ("specific charge") greater than 50 millicoulomb/kilogram, which may be another factor requiring corona charging.

The figure of 50 mC/kg was derived by dividing g, the gravitational acceleration at the Earth's surface (about 10 m/s²), by 200 V/m, and multiplying by 1000 to get the units used in studies of powder-coating physics (and the units analysis checks out).

Extrapolating from data in Meng et al., 2008, http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0022-3727/41/19/195207 , 2.3-micron-diameter sulfur particles corona charged at 90 kV should fly. However, a ten-fold smaller sulfur particle will have a ten-fold greater specific charge, giving some margin to allow for discharging on the way up.

The diameter of the sulfur particle injected into the stratosphere is unrelated to the diameter of the eventual sulfuric acid droplets it produces upon oxidation in the stratosphere, because one reaction intermediate, sulfur dioxide, is gaseous.

At this time, my best guess as to how fast the particles would rise is 3 cm/s (because I believe I have seen it), which will take them up to the stratosphere in four to five days. 

Ideal release conditions are low barometric pressure (i.e., rising airmass) but no clouds. This need not be a contradiction in terms if the rising air is dry to begin with. For example, dry polar air warmed by contact with arid ground should rise without cloud formation.

However, thus far, my calculations have not addressed the fact that the sky electric field weakens with height. At an altitude of 12 km, it is only 5 V/m, versus 100-200 V/m at sea level. The altitude effect will cause the particles to stop ascending and start concentrating at a particular altitude  (a possibly useful effect) where gravitational and coulombic forces are in equilibrium, but is it stratospheric? Unfortunately, no. Even reducing particle diameter 10-fold to 0.23 microns (which uses up our margin for discharge) only gives 4.5 km, less than the minimum height of the stratosphere, 8 km. So, we don't get there, unless we stand on a mountain top in Greenland, but we get interestingly close with what is only the first scheme contemplated. My source for the dependence of electric field on height is figure 20-7a in https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/space-weather/online-publications/miscellaneous/afrl_publications/handbook_1985/Chptr20.pdf

The weakening of the Earth’s gravity with height is no help, because if you go up to 12 km, the difference is only one-half of one percent.

The problem of particles discharging en route is far from trivial, but charged dust particles suspended in air at ground level lose charge with a half-life of about 4 days ( https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac220 ), independent of composition, which is not too discouraging, but the loss will be faster at altitude, where air ionization by cosmic rays is more intense.

We could use electrons as an ion scavenging agent, to be released under the aerosols as a way to continuously guard the ascending aerosols from cation recruitment, which is the main mechanism of neutralization of negatively charged airborne particles according to the previous citation. Electrons (as hydrated hydroxide anions) could be injected into the air by smoke-detector-type Americium discs sitting on top of three-meter-high grounding stakes driven into the ground.  The ground is 360 kV negative relative to an imaginary capacitor plate in the ionosphere. Alpha particles, the main form of radiation from Americium, only travel 4.5 cm in air, if you are worried about safety. In that distance, they make many air cations (+)  and anions (-) through molecular collisions, giving a current of a few nanoamperes per disc (a thousand times greater than the natural current descending into one square meter). The local fair-weather electric field will be concentrated at the top of the pole and will pull down all the cations while repelling the anions upward.  An array of these "radioelectrodes," possibly extending over many square kilometers, will be needed because a fairly strong electric field will be pulling cations in from the sides. The ozone byproduct generation (7 molecules per 100 eV of alpha-particle energy) should be manageable. Connecting all radioelectrodes to a central station by buried wires would allow grounding independent of soil moisture and, with suitably insulated poles, would also allow non-ground DC potentials to be applied to the radioelectrodes. The latter feature would be an elegant way to control the amount of current flowing from the radioelectrodes into the lower atmosphere. Voltages far less than those needed for corona discharge would suffice.

If the effect of this scavenging on air conductivity is uniform with height, there should be no effect on the profile of field intensity with height. If the conductivity change is concentrated at low altitudes, there will be. Injecting enough charge carriers to increase the air conductivity will, in this case, tend to flatten the profile of field strength with height, which could be advantageous and increase the height to which particles can be lifted. My circuit model for these conclusions was a multi-tapped voltage divider connected across a battery. 

Most of the resistance of the air column is concentrated at low altitudes, and this is where we can most easily reach it, so, it’s a break. Reducing this resistance should efficiently increase the current flowing in the air column, pulling it in at the top from the sides, thus concentrating it, thus concentrating the power available from this source. The enhanced current will enhance the vertical electric fields all the way up.

DISCUSSION:

Other climate manipulations can be imagined, such as increasing the winter snowpack in Canada and Russia by seeding supercooled clouds with ice-nucleating proteins isolated from Pseudomonas syringae and a few other species of bacteria.

Another possibility is carbon sequestration in fertilized wetlands, but the strong greenhouse gas methane will be produced as a byproduct. Combining direct physical temperature control with carbon sequestration, however, would unlock access to a simple wetlands strategy for regaining carbon balance. Carbon sequestration in wetlands is how the non-marine fossil carbon got into the ground in the first place, and it will be readily available to us as peat fuel if we need it again some day, for example, to reverse a temperature undershoot by burning some fossil fuel again. 

Our task is not to build a cooling system, but a well-engineered control system that can either heat or cool at need. Focusing narrowly on cooling will trigger a continental glaciation sooner or later.   

Every crisis is an opportunity, and the opportunity in this one is to build a system of global climate control that in the future will protect us not only from climate disasters of our own making, but also from natural climate-impacting ones like volcanic explosions, long statistical pauses in volcanic explosions, and changes in solar radiance (How could solar radiance change? Round up the usual sunspots). For probably the first time in history, humans are now collectively powerful enough to control the global climate. This is in large part due to our presently great numbers, so population increase isn’t all bad; people not only consume resources, but they can also do work.

Can we relax some constraints here, given the anticipated economies of a coulombic hoist system? Does injection have to be stratospheric, or will high tropospheric do? Will the high-tropospheric UV flux and spectrum be adequate to convert sulfur aerosols into sulfuric acid before they settle out? Do the light-scattering particles have to be sulfuric acid or can they be electrified mineral dust, pollen, or sea salt? A dominant consideration of particle injection into the high troposphere will be avoidance of cirrus cloud formation, as these clouds have a net greenhouse effect. Ice-nucleating particles ameliorate the cirrus cloud problem. Such particles can consist of bismuth tri-iodide or natural isoprenoid organics of 0.1 microns or less. Moreover, cirrus clouds originate in precisely the dry updraft areas I previously identified as the best release sites for the Coulombic hoist (CH), which is  sixty degrees north, the northernmost boundary of the prairie provinces, so the CH lends itself to raising particles into the high troposphere for purposes of cirrus cloud thinning. A net warming effect due to overseeding is thought to be a possibility, however. 

High-tropospheric injections will be more reversible, if mistakes are made (and they will be), than will stratospheric injections, because the climate effects of a pulsed injection at this altitude last only 1 to 3 months. Geographically, the effects will also be less than global, allowing a more pluralistic and thus acceptable governance model, as well as offering the enticing possibility of regional climate tweaking. Artificial heating and cooling effects at any altitude will have to be balanced between northern and southern hemispheres to avoid shifting the latitude of the monsoon rains; any such shift would cause hardship to millions of farmers and food insecurity for many more.

As to the pollution aspects, nobody lives in the high troposphere, and acid rain from the amount of sulfuric acid needed for climate control will be diluted over large areas and need not be net-harmful. You can be poisoned by too much vitamin D, but that does not mean that nobody should have any vitamin D. This type of situation is called "hormesis," and it is quite common.

Of course, we will have to be careful.

Because discretion is the better part of valour.

11-18-2024: A search should be undertaken for natural Coulombic hoists or aeolian hoists already in existence that could be modified for climate control. Electric levitation is already implicated in greatly extending how far Saharan dust travels before settling out (see previous link).

I have a BSc in Engineering Chemistry, 1977, from Queen’s University, Ontario.

How I Fixed Dust Infiltration

Last update Jul. 5, 2024. 

This post is slightly out of scope for this blog, being a sharing of experience and how-to piece, not a suggestion for a social experiment. Call it a case study, the conclusions of which always require confirmation.

I concluded based on copious and diverse lived evidence that I was being made sick by dust infiltrating into my apartment. The answer (symptom reduction) was to seal up all dust entry points in my apartment. This is a medium-sized, basement apartment in an older WWII-era apartment block. The entry points were many and varied. To find them all, I needed a mirror and strong light to see under every overhang. If you try this, always illuminate areas from a variety of angles. If I cannot keep my eyes open for longer than twelve seconds without blinking, I have a problem.

The applicable maxim is not “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but “When in doubt, fix it.”

I will not be imparting all my thoughts on this topic; compile a list of rules of thumb that help you discover dust entry points in your location.

This dust is extremely penetrating and may be full of static electricity; if you can  see a crack, it’s too wide. On a white surface, an important hole can be misinterpreted as a small piece of debris such as an adhering paint chip. Biological containment facility-grade workmanship may be required, which in any event will be useful against objectionable smells, hot or cold drafts, insect visitors, asbestos, mold, radon, COVID, or whatever comes down the pike next. (June, 2023: What came down the pike next was wildfire smoke.) Moreover, this dust does not seem to settle in confined spaces: a mirror set out in a closed cupboard or closet will collect nothing, even if the space contains active dust entry points.

Sealant applied near the ceiling or near any metal inexplicably develops bubbles, ridges, and holes before it can fully cure. Using the minimum amount of a fast-drying adhesive such as plumber’s glue (Gloozit) is helpful. 

Gloozit is transparent and colourless, so its presence will not be offputting to future tenants and thus the landlord, if you do a neat job. (Cleans up in Varsol.) 

Before sealing anything, vacuum the area and wipe it down with a paper towel moistened with Varsol followed by a dry wipe. Dust entry points accumulate an oily substancee, also inexplicably, which must be removed with Varsol before sealing. Another sealant, which is preferred because of its durability, is clear silicone caulking or white, paintable silicone caulking. You will need a caulking gun with the silicone caulking. Use lots of paper towels to clean excess sealant and buy a caulking tool to keep things neat. Paintable silicone is also useful for filling in pits in walls. Use the straight end of the caulking tool to create a flat surface after application.

In tile floors, the grout may crack and create dust entry points. Use a toothbrush to scrub the grout with concentrated bleach, wipe, rinse, and allow to dry. Then mask off the damaged grout with post-it notes, apply clear silicone caulking, tool, lift off the masking, and touch up if necessary. Clean smears off the tile with the straight end of the tool. Allow to cure overnight. The paper masking is set very slightly back from the edge of the tile, to allow the caulking to bridge across cracks that occur exactly at the edge.

To seal a big hole in an otherwise flat surface, apply a wall-repair patch followed by spackling applied with a 3” drywall putty knife. For straight, wide gaps, substitute backer rod for the wall repair patch and apply spackling as before. Contractor-grade masking tape can be useful but will not stick if you get sweat on it or on the surface it will go on. Impossibly complex areas like windows can simply be sealed off behind window film.

Because of the complexity factor, I had to isolate a closet and seal it off with weatherstripping on the frame of the door, which is now kept closed. The weatherstripping should not be too stiff, to keep down the force needed to close the door. All old paint was cleaned off the striker plate. A 1/2"-thick rectangular plywood insert was placed on the floor to hold the weatherstripping against the bottom of the door and transfer the closing force to the back wall. (A door bumper strip may also work.) I measured carefully before cutting the insert to size; this was a precision job. The weatherstripping was caulked in the corners. The crack between the insert and the floor was also caulked along the front. I ran my finger along all mating surfaces to make sure they were flat and eliminated all hollows and bumps, even small ones caused by old paint runs. Broad defects that require a straightedge to detect did not seem to be a problem. I finished with a light test on the theory that if the door doesn’t leak light, it doesn’t leak dust. Glowing sections were built up further with weatherstripping tapered at the ends and supplemented at the dicey spots with gaskets made by applying a slight excess of silicone caulking, covering it with scotch tape, closing the door firmly, and going to bed. Before starting the gasket job, put masking tape on the door to prevent silicone caulking from bonding to the paint job, which would eliminate the option of a quick undo. (A slow undo remains possible by alternately softening the caulking with Varsol and gently scraping with a fingernail.) An alternative to the light test is the stain test, based on transferring a thin layer of fresh, colored silicone caulking from the door to the weatherstripping when the door is temporarily closed. Uncolored spots on the weatherstripping indicate dust entry points.

Since your head will be close to dust entry points during this process, you must wear a respirator rated for hazardous dusts while you work and as much as possible at all other times, until you are finished. 

Progress can be judged by laying out mirrors for a fixed time and assessing the amount of dust they accumulate using a strong light such as a gooseneck desk lamp. This method can be used with multiple simultaneously exposed, identical, numbered mirrors to obtain spatial information about dust infiltration. One mirror in each corner of the room and in each corner of each window and door seems to suffice, but if you are not making progress, use more. You may have to hang some mirrors from map pins. Diagramming helps; locate the worst corner and then refine your estimate of where the entry point is by examining the diagonal greater-than relationships. The observed spatial pattern can be distorted by gravity, ambient electric fields, the updraft behind the refrigerator, your own dust-raising activities (notably running the vacuum cleaner, pouring powders, or changing clothes), and any large grounded appliances. A diverse mixture of particle sizes on the mirror indicates resuspended old dust, not newly entered dust. Close to the entry point, dust is small, numerous, and irregularly spaced; dust that has travelled far from the entry point is larger, sparser, and more regularly spaced. Be open minded and don’t get hung up on one explanation of how the dust is getting in.

A mirror suitable for elevated sampling locations 

Cover all air inlet and outlet registers with MERV 13 furnace filters attached and sealed with masking tape or Mulco (a clear, so-called temporary sealant that comes off with a little acetone).

All masking tape seals will develop loose spots over time, which can be seen with a strong light held at a low angle and moved around, and patched up by applying Gloozit with the finger. Adhesive tapes generally will not stick very long to anything that does not feel flat to the touch. This includes the tape used to apply window film. If necessary, sand it flat and clean off the standings before applying tape. Remember that older paint may contain lead and wear your respirator while sanding.

Temporarily remove everything removable, like doors, cupboards, and range hoods, to inspect behind them for cracks and holes. You wouldn’t think a door hinge could conceal an opening in the frame, but it can. Always use a permanent repair product in such areas and avoid tapes and temporary sealants, because you don't want to have to re-access the area in a year or month. Doors are more conveniently treated one hinge at a time, after door-stopping and shimming underneath to support the weight of the door while one hinge is unfastened. Seal all empty fastener holes you find, not just in door frames, and seal around the heads of any fasteners that appear slightly canted. Ask the landlord to make any obviously needed repairs if the defect could let in dust, but don’t get known as a complainer. Compliment the landlord for the repair on Google Reviews or BBB. 

Whenever you seal anything, come back and inspect for new holes a day later. 

If there is no chance that the airspace on the far side of the surface you are sealing can become pressurized, seal it with petroleum jelly (Vaseline). This product is also useful for controlling what silicone caulking sticks to.

Standard electrical wall switches are not dust entry points if the cover plate is sealed to the switch and to the surrounding wall.

To anticipate dust entry points, I sometimes imagine my living space as completely submerged in water and ask myself, “Where could it leak in?”

You will have to do maintenance on your sealing job, so keep those mirrors.

A crack or chip in a coat of paint can be a dust entry point if the paint has separated from the underlying surface, thereby creating a narrow space in which air-suspended dust can flow. Analogously, a kitchen counter made of particleboard covered in laminated plastic can develop delaminations that allow dust entry where the board has been repeatedly wetted and/or traumatized.

A dust entry point under a faucet in the bathroom (red arrow)
This one was really hard to find.

A massive piece of furniture moved close to a previously sealed moulding can push down the floor enough to make cracks around the moulding, either at that point or within a few feet to either side. Seal these cracks with paintable silicone caulking and move the furniture back to its intended use position while the caulking is still wet.

Do You Have All the Latest Patches?

There's about five and a half billion adult humans alive right now, and any two of them would be more powerful than you if they cooperated and your gang wasn't around, and they kind of do all cooperate, mostly subconsciously, and we call it God.

Geese flying in formation: a simple swarm intelligence phenomenon 

In a fast-moving malware landscape, commonly used programs often need quick patches (code snippets) to close newly discovered vulnerabilities and keep them useable.

Let us suppose that humans are like that. Let us suppose the existence of something real behind belief in God: a human swarm intelligence that is slow-moving and poorly accessible to consciousness. This swarm intelligence would be a product of natural selection and [the rest of this paragraph is conjecture] talks to us in a language of emotions. It tracks slow changes in the environment while the conscious mind tracks the fast ones. The two environment trackers communicate via a frequency band centered on one reciprocal week. This is also the dividing line between the bands processed by the two trackers.

 The week does not correspond to any astrophysical cycle; it is an invention (discovery?) of religion. 

What were you doing last weekend? Don’t remember, huh? You don’t need to; God will calculate.

Arguably, the slow swarm intelligence will occasionally fall behind in tracking especially rapid environmental change (e.g., global warming), show evidence of a weak spot in its frequency response, and, pardon the blasphemy, need to be patched. At least until natural selection catches up. Logically, this same natural selection should by now have come up with a solution: A proclivity of humans to self-organize into some patch-applying sub-process. This would be organized religion, of course.

The last patch applied to human nature seems to have been a package of five patches: the Pillars of Islam. Before that, we received two big patches at once: Jesus’ "Love God” and “Love thy neighbor.”

However, we now live in a world that would have been inconceivable to the 12 disciples and the early followers of Mohammed, and collectively we are facing unprecedented existential threats. Is it time for another patch?

I say yes, two in fact, and I suggest that the needed patches will be something very like this:

“Love Thy Planet,”

and

“Do Not Divide the People.”

The first of these precepts is already addressed by a recently-added fifth Mark of Mission of the Anglican church and a sixth Mark of Mission that speaks to the second patch was accepted on principle, then folded into the fourth Mark of Mission. The proposed patches are also echoed in the Anglican Baptism Covenant. Many other people have obviously been thinking along the same lines as myself. The new “commandments” will have to be presented and received as the voice of God to be effective, and I will not here tell organized religion how to do its job.

However, does organized religion itself need a patch? It seems to suffer from a worrisome lack of flexibility, leading to hand-wringing schisms. Perhaps a further needed patch is the definition of a new kind of commandment from God that could be called a “manifest commandment,” as opposed to a prophet-channeled commandment. This would be God talking to the entire human race at once.

Since there is little time, we cannot wait millennia to accumulate enough testing of new precepts in the crucible of life to confidently promote them to commandments from God. For example, the two I just mentioned. Thus, we must aggregate such human experience across space instead of time, using the Internet. Luckily, there are now about 5.5 billion of us able to participate, which should ensure a very high-powered study. Since this would essentially be an experiment on humans, the internet could also be used to collect the ethically required written, informed consents.

The above  reasoning argues against atheism but not for the status quo. Is panreligionism the only way to ensure that you have all the latest patches? Oligoreligionism may be more practical. I now have an app on my phone that notifies me of the Islamic prayer times, even the ones after dark. I don’t say the prayers but meditate instead. I wake up in the morning feeling like I have been watched over all night. 

However, the ideal human swarm intelligence will be a function of the details of the problems of existence we face, and these details will be a function of geographical variables like latitude, altitude, and distance from the ocean. Even with the same details, different populations will need different patches because of historical factors, such as the amount of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA they have. 

Photo by Nancy Hughes on Unsplash

Music

Today, while walking in a gentle snowfall, canned carols echoing in memory, I admitted to myself, "I don't understand music. I love it, and I don't understand it."

Five minutes later, I had the beginnings of a theory:

Music is the voice of the swarm intelligence.

Listen carefully, because the swarm intelligence is your ruler.

And don't be shy about being its voice yourself.

Just honestly sing out the message of your heart and

let the chips fall where they may.

You won't see where they fall.

Algonquin College, Ottawa, Canada

Recipe for "Covid Cocklewarmer"

Try this if you are bored with being cooped up at home.
This is my peanut-butter coffee recipe, and as such, it is a caffeinated beverage that will activate your brain. If you are like me, your brain is always your best source of entertainment.

"Slurp! Praise the Lord and pass the antiseptic!"

© 2020 David Matthew Mooney

Both versions make one serving.

Store the tap water in a refrigerator at 4–6°C.

Do not serve hotter than 56°C or the mixture breaks like Hollandaise. (But it's much easier to fix: just let it cool for a bit and then swirl.)*

To go hotter than 56°C without breaking, microwave the water longer to taste and add a tablespoon of milk before shaking.

Instant coffee version:

• Add 300 mL of water to a mason jar free of scratches.
• Heat jar in a 700-W microwave at maximum power for 2 min 30 sec without lid.
• Add 1 tablespoon (15 mL) of sugar.
• Add 2 tablespoons (30 mL) of instant coffee.
• Add 2 tablespoons (30 mL) of smooth, non-separating peanut butter.
• Put on a glove or pick up a dishcloth for comfort in handling the hot jar.
• Close lid and shake the jar up-and-down vigorously for 15 sec.

Filter coffee version (preparation time, 10 min):

• Add 400 mL water to a mason jar free of scratches.
• Heat jar in a 700-W microwave at maximum power for 3 min 40 sec without lid. Aim for 75°C.
• Pour the water into a large plastic cup. Test the cup first to see if it is melted by the hot water; some are and some aren't.
• Place a filter containing 3.5 tablespoons of fine-grind coffee on the jar.
• Pour the water through the coffee.
• Remove the filter.
• Add 1 tablespoon (15  mL) of sugar to the jar.
• Add 2 tablespoons (30 mL) of smooth, non-separating peanut butter.
• Put on a glove or pick up a dishcloth for comfort in handling the hot jar.
• Close lid and shake the jar up-and-down vigorously for 15 sec.

Note 1: Do not add a hot mixture to a cold container and then shake. This will cause the container to suddenly pressurize at the first shake, with unpredictable consequences. 

This filter gives the slowest percolation and therefore the best kick of the three that I have tried. Don't bother to change the microwaving time.

*Note 2: Kraft "Extra-roasted" peanut butter <07-12-2021: and now, the regular kind> can be pushed to 60°C in this recipe without breaking, but the mouth feel is not as good. <07-25-2021: JIF is better.>

01-14-2022: Peanut-butter tea tastes like walnuts. It’s like somebody made a milk substitute out of walnuts instead of almonds. Not bad. It doesn’t curdle like peanut-butter coffee either, at least not at 72 C (162 Fahrenheit). I used double-strength green tea, but followed the rest of the above recipe.

Here is an update on my cocklewarmer setup, 2.5 years on.

Overpop Redemption

The world's many current problems are consistent with a state of overpopulation. The Reverend Malthus laid them out for us long ago: 

• The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

Chapter 7, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798

T. R. Malthus

Nowadays (2020), we may add global climate change and global pandemics to the list. 

Clearly, people must change their ways. Governments can help, but direct actions consisting of just passing new coercive laws were tried in China and were eventually abandoned. Moreover, "The best government is that which governs least." (motto of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, founded by John O'Sullivan). By a parsimony principle I am fond of, what we want, then, is the minimum adequate response to Overpop. 

My suggestion is: Estateism.

Your "estate" is basically your net worth from all sources minus liabilities, usually considered at the time of death. By "estateism," I mean a life plan focussed on enriching your estate for the benefit of your nearest relatives after your death, as an emotional substitute for raising your own family. Is such a life plan necessarily "thin gruel," emotionally speaking? Not if you know no better--then it is sufficient, as I can testify. 

Governments can help lead the way by lifting all estate taxes from those who die childless and giving proportionate estate-tax breaks to those who die with fewer direct descendants than the national average. If near relatives young enough to reproduce are named as beneficiaries, they would pay no inheritance tax. 

The theory of kin selection by W. D. Hamilton suggests that this lifestyle makes evolutionary sense. Those who adopt it could represent the way of the future, termed "eusociality" by biologists. Many biological precedents for the workability of this idea are known, some of them in mammals. Estateists would be formally like the non-reproducing worker bees in a bee colony, but humans who adopt estateism cannot turn into insects. If you think that they can, tell me how that would happen, exactly; and no hand-waving, please. 

An estateist is free of the oppressive burdens of raising a family and need suffer no sleep deprivation due to the crying of some colicky infant. There is no attempt to balance work and family, which should make for a highly effective worker more than able to enrich his or her estate. The theory of kin selection, which seems to find an echo in the human "heart," is the intellectual anchor for such a life and suffices to give it meaning. 

03-19-2020: An objection can be raised to the foregoing that the inheritors of Estateist benefits will be tempted to expand the size of their families as a direct result, thereby offsetting the reproductive self-restraint of their Estateist relatives in fine Malthusian style. However, I doubt that human reproduction is as elastic as this scenario assumes, but the matter can be decided by mathematical modelling and computer simulations. In the event of bad news from the simulations, the effectiveness of Estateism as population control could be enhanced by testamentary stipulations on the uses to which the inherited wealth can be put, which would aim to prevent its use to support an abnormally large family instead of better nurturing of a normal-sized family. (The biological precedent for this is called "K-selection," an aspect of Life History Theory.) In that event, permitted uses of an Estateist inheritance would be such things as education, training, insurance, medical expenses, rehabilitation, and relocation.

04-14-2020: To this list I should add lawyer's fees--the sting of the Estateist.

The Shadow of the Observer

Albert Einstein once likened the body of scientific knowledge to an ever-expanding circle of light, and made the point that because of the expansion, the frontier of knowledge--the perimeter of the circle--will likewise be ever-expanding. I think that a more important point can be made; Einstein's circle of light has a shadow in the center where we the observers are standing. This shadow is the continuing lack of understanding of human nature in terms that relate back to the hard sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology. Before we can relate it that far back, we must first pass through neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary psychology. Especially evolutionary psychology. Only then will we be able to devise efficient solutions to the problems that still beset humanity, because our solutions will touch the true causes of things.

Countless earnest workers in the humanities and soft sciences have been seeking an understanding of human nature. Why has this not sufficed? I suspect it is because key determinants of human behavior are processed through the unconscious pathways of the brain and are therefore never available for conscious introspection. For example, I strongly suspect that crowding stress is the master variable governing human history. This would simply be humans per hectare. Why are we therefore not acutely aware of it at all times? Because (hypothetically) it is represented in the right amygdala, which is known to be specialized for unconscious emotion processing. (The left amygdala is known to be specialized for conscious emotion processing.) This is an easily tested prediction.

The computations of the amygdala are most usefully understood in terms of the evolutionary selection process that created the human brain. This is why I think it important at this time to devote public funding to evolutionary psychology, the study of evolution as it pertains to explaining human behavior. You may object that generations of research investment will be needed before such an abstruse-sounding discipline will begin to yield practical benefits, but I beg to differ. Evolutionary psychology is a new field, and in new fields, there is still low-hanging fruit. In my theory blog, "Theoretician's Progress," at http://mmmtheory.blogspot.com, I have been scouting some of this low-hanging fruit, and there is plenty. My preliminary conclusions are written up in that blog in posts tagged as containing evolutionary-psychological subject matter.

We have to solve the ancient problems with ourselves before we can hope to solve the new problems such as climate change. Imagine, for example, that a narrowly technological solution to climate change is attempted, such as an orbiting space mirror. Who then decides what the target set point for the global temperature shall be? Temperate  countries will want it set higher; equatorial countries will want it set lower. The first country that feels left out of the decision-making process will start a vigorous space program aimed at blowing up the space mirror. Assuming the terrorists or some small, selfish interest group nobody ever heard of before does not get to it first. How can we hope to control the temperature of a whole, damned planet when we can't even control ourselves?